I am so proud to have inducted 17 students into the Powhatan High School Computer Science Honor Society! These students have exceeded the academic requirements and have committed to serve their community by promoting computer science education!

Buffie Holley from Albemarle High School in Charlottesville Virginia is the project lead for this CodeVA founded honor society. Buffie and CodeVA have made this process easy and seamless. For more information, go to the CodeVA honor society page. On this page, you will find the VA CS Honor Society Constitution, a template for the charter by laws, and the charter application.

I am so excited to honor my students that have worked hard supporting computer science education in our county. This has proved to be a great way to celebrate their accomplishments and passion.

After I handed out the initiation pins to my students, one of my female students said “I feel like I can do anything with this pin on!”.

We have been using Codecademy in the CS Principles course to cover HTML and CSS (the abstraction part of the Big Ideas). IT is a great tool – lets the kids self pace, give instant feedback. They have made some pretty amazing things.

While the math standards are well on their way to being implemented and assessed, Achieve’s new effort on the science standards is still in development, and they need to hear from you about the importance of having real, engaging computer science in these standards.

I am so glad to see the update. Gone is the one of blame and the factual errors about the APCS exam. The whole tone reflects their stated purpose of “Teach Girls To Program Before People Tell Them They Can’t Do It”. Great approach.

I really love that they now include information on stereotype threat. Joanne Cohoon at UVA has done a lot of great work on this as it relates to females in computer science. It is her research at NCWIT the reference at the bottom. And while we are at it, have you been to a Tapestry Workshop? If not put it on your list for next summer, absolutely will change your teaching. Resources from past workshops are posted on the site, so you can read ahead,

For the Computer Science Principles classes last week I had them define Computer Science . The Wordle below is from their definitions after Unit 1. I am planning on having them do this each unit and see how our collective definition shifts as we layer on more material. I think this might make a good writing prompt later int he year.

For high school students it raises some interesting questions about where they might be working in the future. Many of the kids I teach do not end up working in fields strictly defined as computer science, yet no matter where they go they will be using computing devices.
So what does that mean for our students? To be part of the group of people that have influence…the deciders if you will, means you need to have a specific set of skills. Last century it was literacy. To have a chance at being a person of influence meant you had to read and communicate well.

Clearly those skills are still crucial, but in the past few decades a parallel set of skill has emerged. Computing.

I don’t mean typing and application literacy. Beyond that students need to understand computing at a deeper level to be able to decide what problems computers can, and cannot, be used to solve.

That is why this graphic is so interesting to me. Think about your student planning on going into the restaurant/food industry. While mastery of a particular programming language may not be something they need I would argue that the underlying ideas and concepts of computer science will serve them well. That skill sets them apart in an industry that is becoming more and more reliant on computing devices.

I’ve been trying to keep up with all of the new ways to learn to code online – the first list is here. The new APCS Principles course has a lot of elements that move beyond teaching computer science as a coding class, including teaching about the Internet and using data. It is getting hard to keep up.